“Who does, then?”
“You know who.”
Ruth and her father looked at each other for a long minute. “You could stand up to the Ellises if you wanted to, Dad.”
“No, I couldn’t, Ruth. And neither can you.”
“Liar.”
“I told you to stop saying that.”
“Pussy,” Ruth said, to her own immense surprise.
“If you don’t watch your fucking mouth,” Ruth’s father said, and he walked out of the house.
That was the incident.
Ruth finished cleaning up the kitchen and headed over to Mrs. Pommeroy’s. She cried for about an hour on her bed while Mrs. Pommeroy stroked her hair and said, “Why don’t you tell me what happened?”
Ruth said, “He’s just such a pussy.”
“Where did you learn that word, hon?”
“He’s such a fucking coward. It’s pathetic. Why can’t he be more like Angus Addams? Why can’t he stand up for something?”
“You wouldn’t really want Angus Addams for a father, would you, Ruth?”
This made Ruth cry harder, and Mrs. Pommeroy said, “Oh, sweetheart. You’re sure having a tough time this year.”
Robin came into the room and said, “What’s all the noise? Who’s blubbering?” Ruth shouted, “Get him out of here!” Robin said, “It’s my house, bitch.” And Mrs. Pommeroy said, “You two are like brother and sister.”
Ruth stopped crying and said, “I can’t believe this fucking place.”
“What place?” Mrs. Pommeroy asked. “What place, hon?”
Ruth stayed at the Pommeroy house through July and August and on into the beginning of September. Sometimes she went next door to her house, to her father’s house, when she knew he’d be out hauling, and picked up a clean blouse or a book to read, or tried to guess what he’d been eating. She had nothing to do. She had no job. She had given up even pretending that she wanted to work as a sternman, and nobody asked her anymore what plans she had. She was clearly never going to be offered work on a boat. And for people who didn’t work on boats on Fort Niles in 1976, there wasn’t a whole lot else to do.
Ruth had nothing to occupy herself. At least Mrs. Pommeroy could do needlepoint. And Kitty Pommeroy had her alcoholism for companionship. Webster Pommeroy had the mudflats to sift through, and Senator Simon had his dream of the Museum of Natural History. Ruth had nothing. Sometimes she thought she most resembled the oldest citizens of Fort Niles, the tiny ancient women who sat at their front windows and parted the curtains to see what was going on out there, on the rare instances that anyone walked past their homes.
She was sharing Mrs. Pommeroy’s home with Webster and Robin and Timothy Pommeroy, and with Robin’s fat wife, Opal, and their big baby, Eddie. She was also sharing it with Kitty Pommeroy, who’d been thrown out of her house by Ruth’s Uncle Len Thomas. Len had taken up Florida Cobb, of all desperate women. Florida Cobb, Russ and Ivy Cobb’s grown daughter, who rarely said a word and who’d spent her life gaining weight and painting pictures on sand dollars, was now living with Len Thomas. Kitty was in bad shape over this. She’d threatened Len with a shotgun, but he took it away from her and blasted it into her oven.
“I thought Florida Cobb was my goddamn friend,” Kitty said to Ruth, although Florida Cobb had never been anyone’s friend.
Kitty told Mrs. Pommeroy the whole sad story of her last night at home with Len Thomas. Ruth could hear the two women talking in Mrs. Pommeroy’s bedroom, with the door shut. She could hear Kitty sobbing and sobbing. When Mrs. Pommeroy finally came out, Ruth asked, “What did she say? What’s the story?”
“I don’t want to hear it twice, Ruth,” Mrs. Pommeroy said.
“Twice?”
“I don’t want to hear it once out of her mouth and once out of mine. Just forget it. She’ll be staying here from now on.”
Ruth was beginning to realize that Kitty Pommeroy woke up every day more drunk than most people would be in their entire lives. At night, she would cry and cry, and Mrs. Pommeroy and Ruth would put her to bed. She’d punch them as they struggled with her up the stairs. This happened nearly every day. Kitty even clocked Ruth in the face once and made her nose bleed. Opal was never any help in dealing with Kitty. She was afraid of getting hit, so she sat in the corner and cried while Mrs. Pommeroy and Ruth took care of everything.
Opal said, “I don’t want my baby growing up around all this yelling.”
“Then move into your own goddamn house,” Ruth said.
“You move into your own goddamn house!” Robin Pommeroy said to Ruth.
“You all are just like brothers and sisters,” Mrs. Pommeroy said. “Always teasing each other.”
Ruth couldn’t see Owney. She hadn’t seen him since the wedding. Pastor Wishnell was making sure of that. The pastor had decided to spend the fall on a grand tour of the Maine islands, with Owney as his captain, sailing the New Hope to every dock in the Atlantic from Portsmouth to Nova Scotia, preaching, preaching, preaching.
Owney never called Ruth, but how could he? He had no number for her, no idea that she was living with Mrs. Pommeroy. Ruth didn’t so much mind not being called; they’d probably have had little to say to each other on the phone. Owney wasn’t much of a conversationalist in person, and she couldn’t imagine dallying away hours with him over the line. They’d never had all that much to talk about. Ruth didn’t want to talk to Owney, anyhow. She wasn’t curious to catch up with Owney on local gossip, but that didn’t mean she wasn’t missing him or, rather, craving him. She wanted to be with him. She wanted him in the room with her so that she could feel again the comfort of his body and his silence. She wanted to have sex with him again, in the worst way. She wanted to be naked with Owney, and thinking about that filled up a good bit of her time. She thought about it while in the bathtub and in bed. She talked to Mrs. Pommeroy again and again about the one time she’d had sex with Owney. Mrs. Pommeroy wanted to hear all the different parts, everything the two of them had done, and she seemed to approve.
Ruth was sleeping on the top floor of the big Pommeroy house, in the bedroom Mrs. Pommeroy had first tried to give her when she was nine-the bedroom with the faint, rusty blood spatters on the wall where that long-ago Pommeroy uncle had taken his life with a shotgun blast in the mouth.
“As long as it doesn’t bother you,” Mrs. Pommeroy told Ruth.
“Not a bit.”
There was a heating vent on the floor, and if Ruth lay with her head near it, she could hear conversations throughout the house. The eavesdropping brought her comfort. She could hide and pay attention. And, for the most part, Ruth’s occupation that autumn was hiding. She was hiding from her father, which was easy, because he wasn’t looking for her. She was hiding from Angus Addams, which was slightly more difficult, because Angus would cross the street if he saw her and tell her what a dirty little whore she was, fucking around with a Wishnell, trash-mouthing her father, slinking around town.
“Yeah,” he’d say. “I heard about it. Don’t think I didn’t fucking hear about it.”
“Leave me alone, Angus,” Ruth would say. “It’s none of your business.”
“You slutty little slut.”
“He’s just teasing you,” Mrs. Pommeroy would tell Ruth if she happened to be there, witnessing the insult. This made both Ruth and Angus indignant.
“You call that teasing?” Ruth would say.
“I’m not goddamn teasing anyone,” Angus would say, equally disgusted. Mrs. Pommeroy, refusing to become upset, would say, “Of course you are, Angus. You’re just a big tease.”
“You know what we have to do?” Mrs. Pommeroy told Ruth again and again. “We have to let the dust settle. Everyone loves you here, but people are a little worked up.”
The biggest portion of Ruth’s hiding occupation during August involved Mr. Ellis, which meant she was hiding from Cal Cooley. More than anything else, she did not want to see Mr. Ellis, and she knew Cal would someday fetch her and bring her to Ellis House. She knew that Lanford Ellis would have a plan for her, and she wanted no part of it. Mrs. Pommeroy and Senator Simon helped her hide from Cal. When Cal came to the Pommeroy house looking for Ruth, Mrs. Pommeroy would tell him she was with Senator Simon, and when Cal asked for Ruth over at the Senator’s, he was told she was at Mrs. Pommeroy’s place. But the island was only four miles long; how long could that game last? Ruth knew that when Cal really wanted to catch her, he would. And he did catch her, one morning at the end of August, at the Ellis Granite Company Store building, where she was helping the Senator build display cases for his museum.